Just an unofficial design concept, but damn, this is sexy. This is exactly what Windows needs - a combination of the old and new, leading to something seemingly far more usable than the monstrosity that is Metro in Windows 8.

Easy doesn't have to mean hard on technical folks. Easy could just mean "easy to modify without getting in your way". Microsoft seems hell bent on removing or hiding features that technical folks use regularly and replacing them with non-customizable alternatives. It boggles the mind.

Something I would love to see in any UI: Pinnable, collapsible toolbars. With the following features:
* Pin them to any area of the screen edge
* Allow them to auto-collapse, collapse via trigger (button/switch), stay on top, stay behind, etc.
* Allow them to have as many buttons on them as I choose. Allow me to set a maximum size and having the buttons scroll if needed (with the mouse wheel preferably).
* Allow the icons to be aligned/sorted in any way I wish (single row, grid, arranged by name, manual sorting, etc.).
* Allow me to have icons pinned to the "top" of the list, letting the others scroll off or be accessible via a drop down list, etc. (maintaining the sort order I choose).
* Allow me to have as many of these toolbars as I wish.

I'm actually thinking of a mixture of both. I'm a daily user of KDE4 and it doesn't work like I described, though it is close in some respects. You can add icons to a panel, but you're at their mercy as to how they are displayed (with a few options available). You can add a folder view widget to your desktop but that is far bulkier than what I'd want, though it shares some of the features I mentioned. Consider me picky. :p

When I do need to do image manipulation I choose Gimp more often than not (it's free, fast enough, has more features than I can understand, and works on every platform I use).